A network, such as a hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network, may use orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) channels to communicate with customer premise equipment (CPE) devices, such as cable modems. Each channel may include multiple subcarriers, and a particular modulation, such as a quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) level, is used for each subcarrier. A bitloading profile is a vector of modulation descriptors corresponding to each subcarrier in the OFDM channel. Typically, a base case bitloading profile is used where the modulation level is selected such that all of the network elements connected to the channel can use the modulation. However, there may be some network elements, such as cable modems, using the channel that could use a higher level of modulation in at least some part of the channel's spectrum. network element